Now how in the world did a Vietnamese resident recognize the conductor of the Albany Symphony? Here's a hint: He wouldn't have before April.

In April, the ASO launched a new website that included a blog. And Miller blogged his entire Asian trip. The resident had seen a news report that this American conductor was there, so he went online, found the ASO site and read the blog.

"It was pretty incredible," says Brian Ritter, executive director of the ASO. "Just watching the interaction with David through numbers of people reading the blog and commenting and writing back was really very exciting. It kind of gave us immediate gratification."

That is just one advantage of having a spiffy, interactive website for your arts organization, especially in this time of economic hardship. The biggest advantage is the potential economic benefit of increased ticket sales, subscriptions and donations.

"It's something you pretty much have to do if you want to stay in the game and create a younger customer base," says Deb Foster, marketing manager of Hubbard Hall in Cambridge, which launched its new site last month, "And it's harder and harder to stay in the game these days.

"The arts have been hit very hard by the economy. States are freezing budgets, so you're losing grant money that you've depended on for years. And people don't have the disposable income to go to as many things as they would like to or have in the past."

Websites have come a long way in a short time. A site called Wayback Machine (http://www.archive.org/) allows anyone to go back in time and view websites in their infancy.

Hubbard Hall's site from October 2001, for instance, contained a small, black-and-white sketch of the building, three paragraphs of history, three paragraphs about programs and community arts, and a short form you had to print out, fill in and mail with your membership. It contains no photos, videos, drop-down menus, maps, event listings, links to Facebook and Twitter (who knew?), and, certainly, no way to buy tickets.

"It meant a lot of phone-calling and tickets-at-the-door sort of thing," Foster says. "Now, people can order tickets online. They can update their memberships, purchase subscriptions, register for classes. It's much more informative, accessible and visibly appealing -- much more customer-friendly.

"And for us, although we produce an enormous amount of events and projects, we're an extremely small staff -- beyond small. The more we can do to streamline the work, the better. Customers being able to go online and purchase their own tickets, that cuts down phone time and staff time to process all that."

For the ASO, the new website is at least the third major update since the inaugural site's launch maybe 10 years ago, Ritter says.

"The last website, people could buy tickets online, but it was very, very cumbersome and not at all effective," he says. "So for the new design, it was very important for us that we streamline that process. And people can now purchase subscriptions. They couldn't before without going to the site and printing out a form and sending it in."

What the ASO wanted to do, Ritter says, was create a portal into what it does, realizing that it's best known for classical music concerts.

"We're involved in the public schools throughout the region," he says. "We do a variety of composer residencies every year. So the idea with creating this new site was to give people a way to link to those programs. We very purposefully designed the site to be highly interactive in providing a lot of information in various media forms.

"I think we always have to be on the cutting edge of this type of media, on the cutting edge of the social media. We have to have a strong presence with a new site online. It's absolutely critical."

Tom Keyser can be reached at 454-5448 or by e-mail at tkeyser@timesunion.com.